Dr Sadgopal's posting on RTE Bill 2008

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Posted by: " anil sadgopal " anilsadgopal in Jharkhand

Sun Aug 10, 2008 3:29 pm

Dear Rameshwar Singh ji, As desired by you, here is a soft copy of the Draft RTE Bill 2008. This draft was annexed with MHRD's covering letter addressed to the Cabinet Secretariat in February 2008. This was after the feedback from various Ministries and the Planning Commission had been incorporated but before the Law Ministry scrutinised it.

Reportedly, the Law Ministry recommended that all references to " education of equitable quality " may be deleted. If this recommendation is acted upon, it would make the already farcical Bill entirely un-Constitutional by its violation of the central principle of equality.

Hopefully, the workshop you are organizing on this issue will analyse this Bill in the critical perspective of the neoliberal assault on India's education system, as I have attempted to do in my TEHELKA article (14th June 2008) and Non-Negotiables for the Bill already available with you. All this and other relevant material has been placed by Dr. VN Sharma of Ranchi on his blogspot http://jvmjkd.blogspot.com/

 

(All the docs are in this link. So other links are not required. Change made by the sender.) As you must be aware, the Cabinet considered the Draft Bill on 8th August but returned it to a Group of Ministers for reconsideration reportedly on two issues viz. (a) financial obligation of the Centre and the states and (b) obligation of the private unaided schools.

It is indeed ironic that a neoliberal government sends a neoliberal Bill for reconsideration by the high profile supporters of market fundamentalism in the cabinet – Mr. Chidambaram, Mr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Mr. Kapil Sibal. Why? I will venture a guess: this step is being taken so that even the vestiges of the Constitution - the document representing the aspirations of our freedom struggle against imperialism - still left in the Bill could be deleted and the Bill made entirely consistent with the neoliberal policies!

Let me provoke you further. This is not a 'Right to Education Bill, 2008' at all. It should be renamed as 'Right to Discriminatory Education (Promotion of Privatisation, Commercialisation and Multi-Layered School System) Bill, 2008'!

With this provocation, let us hope that your workshop will decode the Bill's hidden agenda of neoliberalism in education and suggest ways and means to resist this onslaught on the nation's children, Sincerely,

Anil Sadgopal-- Dr.V.N.Sharmahttp://canvas.nowpos.com/vnsharma